Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.

Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject

Proletarian language is dictated by hunger. The poor chew words to fill their bellies.

The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.